Dismembered porta-potties, witty signs, and hordes of cramped liberals and moderates marked this past Saturday’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. Rally-goers swarmed the National Mall in what can only be described as an effort to restore “reasonableness.”

The rally, hosted by Comedy Central satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, managed to draw a crowd of around 215,000 people. Though Stewart, poking fun at estimates of Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honor, put the crowd somewhere around “ten million”. The crowd itself was an exemplary example of decorum. There was no jeering, no anger, none of what Stewart described as “animus.”

The show itself revolved around the bantering of Stewart, a proponent of “reason,” and Colbert, the proponent of “fear,” and why each should trump the other.  Ozzy Osbourne, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, and even a seven year old girl were brought out to prove points.

The crowd flaunted signs with ironic, controversial, and more often than not, politically incorrect slogans. Signs like “More reason, less fear” stood hand in hand with signs that asked only the most pertinent of political questions, like “Don’t you hate pants?” Others advocated the “Mr. T Party,” and groups like “Retired CIA Analysts For Sensible Drug Policy.”

Though some, including comedian Bill Maher, criticized the rally for lacking a point.

“If you are going to have a rally in which hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well make it about something,” Maher said.

But Stewart’s final soliloquy pushes a very lucid message.

“Instinctively,” Stewart says, “if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together. And the truth is there will always be darkness, and sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes, it’s just New Jersey.”

Updated November 6: Photo gallery added.